André stole away across the gardens to seek the road yonder where a trusted servant from Paris would be waiting with his best horse.
“She is not a peasant,” he muttered, showing whither his thoughts were travelling. “Well, well!”
“If I am not at the palace by nine o’clock, Jean,” he said as he mounted, “come for my orders to the inn called ‘The Cock with the Spurs of Gold.’” And Jean nodded knowingly.
Orders! André smiled grimly. Dead men can give no orders, not even for their own burial, nor can they take all their secrets with them; more was the pity.
When the servant had disappeared André bound the mare’s hoofs with felt, and she whinnied affectionately, as if she understood. She had only twice been so treated, once the night before Fontenoy and now, for she was the English blood mare which had crushed into pulp the face of that miserable dead woman in the charcoal-burner’s wood and had saved her master’s life from “No. 101” and George Onslow. André stroked her neck and whispered into her ear. To-night she might have to save his honour as well as his life.
Once in the main road André drew rein in the shadow of a tree on the outskirts of the forest and listened attentively. To the right ran the track for farm carts that led directly to the inn, but he decided not to take that. If by any chance he had been followed or an ambush was laid his foes would certainly choose that track, his natural route. He therefore rode past it, again halted to listen, and then plunged fearlessly under the trees, picking his way along a wood-cutter’s disused path.
Already, through the tangle of boughs, he could make out the blurred shape of the inn ahead, when a faint hiss brought his sword from the scabbard. No, that was a low whistle there on the right. That bush, too, just in front was stirring suspiciously; by St. Denys! the crown of a man’s hat? A howl of surprise and pain rent the air. André had driven in his spurs; the maddened mare had leaped on to the bush and the hat with the man’s head under it was cut through with one pitiless stroke of the sword. In went the spurs again; for he saw now there were three others running up from the main track which he had refused to follow. The flash of a pistol: the bullet went through his cloak, but the man who fired it took André’s sword point in his throat and dropped, gurgling. The remaining two stood their ground, and struck at him with their swords. One of them, with a cry “Seigneur Jésu!” lurched forward, run through the breast. But the other had stabbed the mare from behind. She plunged and fell heavily. André felt a sharp pain in his left arm; he, too, was stabbed! He had a vision of himself being tossed through the air, his head struck a tree trunk, and——
When he recovered consciousness he was lying on the ground and all was still. In an agony of bewildered fear he tore his coat open and felt for the despatch. Impossible! Yes, it was still there. A red mist danced in his eyes, his left arm throbbed with pain, but he lay half sobbing with a delirious joy. The despatch was still there! Death and dishonour had not the mastery of him yet.
“You are hurt, Monseigneur?”
Yvonne, in her tattered gown and dishevelled hair, with a lantern in her hand, was kneeling beside him. André staggered to his feet; he scarcely knew whether he was hurt or not. He gazed round, trying to recollect, as the flickering light showed him four men’s bodies lying this way and that near him. Dead, all of them. And his horse—no, that was alive; she whinnied as he tottered up to her.